Oliver Burkeman on simplifying life, starting with your wardrobe

I'm pretty sure I don't belong to the target demographic of the American magazine Real Simple. According to one recent article on simplifying your wardrobe, an A-line woollen skirt is an essential, whereas I've always been more of a jeans person. Another article, on clarifying career goals, urged me to consider whether I was holding myself back at work because I was worried that people would respond with hostility to a strong, focused woman. This isn't a new phenomenon: I've lost count of the times I've picked up a self-help book only to read, on the back cover, that the problems it promises to address aren't being faced by me alone but by countless other women, too. Yet Real Simple (realsimple.com) exerts a fascination that transcends its gender-specific details. Mainly it's the photographs: minimalist kitchens, clean-edged storage systems and people in attractively simple clothing gazing at the ocean without a care, because their cares are all neatly filed away in leather-bound personal organisers. My personal heaven looks a lot like this.

The obvious problem with Real Simple is that this kind of simplicity costs money, which is ironic, given that the original "voluntary simplicity" movement was all about living on less. But there's a slightly less obvious problem with the current vogue for simplicity: a lot of it isn't particularly simple.

Minimalism takes effort. Perfectly organised storage systems need to be constantly maintained; spotless kitchens need to be kept spotless. The Real Simple fantasy implies that a light and airy physical space will make it easy to achieve an inner airy lightness, but if you're using lots of energy to keep your environment that way, it's self-defeating. Likewise with so-called "information overload": I've proclaimed the virtues of an empty email inbox here before, but if digital clutter (or any other kind) doesn't bother you, finding time for purgation will complicate, not simplify, your life. Perhaps a truer simplicity lies in learning to stay calm amid the chaos: not in engineering your environment so that it makes you tranquil, but in reducing the degree to which your tranquillity is dependent on your environment; not keeping the kitchen spotless but learning to tolerate spots; not downshifting to the country, but growing less bothered by the bad aspects of city life? I'm only speculating: personally, I'm appalling at this.

A while back, the magazine editor Bonnie Fuller, best known in the industry for shouting at people and firing them, wrote a book called The Joys Of Much Too Much: Go For The Big Life - The Great Career, The Perfect Guy, And Everything Else You've Ever Wanted. It's basically terrible. But she does see through the fake-simplicity phenomenon, with its "sparse white [magazine] covers" and horizon-limiting message to think small and expend endless effort on the little things. Apart from anything else, reading her made me feel a bit less bad about still not owning a single A-line woollen skirt.